A working map of courses, teaching materials, communities, and open archives in narrative medicine and the health humanities. Most of what follows is free. Last checked mid-2026; always confirm current details on the source's own site before you rely on them.

Not everyone who wants to learn narrative medicine can move to New York for two years. The field's flagship degree sits at Columbia, and it is a good one, but it is a single door into a building with a great many rooms. This page maps the others: the courses you can take at a distance, the teaching materials you can download tonight, the communities you can join without paying anything, and the archives of patient and clinician voices that anyone can read.

One honest caveat before the list. Narrative medicine grew up in the United States and the United Kingdom, and its infrastructure still reflects that. Most degrees, most of the large networks, and most of the open teaching materials below are American or British. We will be writting separately about narrative medicine and the health humanities across Asia, and about the field's Western centre of gravity, so this page does not repeat that argument. It does mean that if you are reading from Manila or Chennai or Nairobi, some of the best resources will need adapting rather than adopting. Where we know of a good Asian or non-Western option, we have said so.

If you already have a finished piece and want to know where to send it, that is a different question with its own answer: see Where to Publish Your Medical Writing. This page is about everything that comes before and around the writing.

Courses and training

Columbia University, MS in Narrative Medicine (New York; paid, competitive). The first master's of its kind, founded in 2009 by Rita Charon, and still the field's central credential. Mostly taught in person on the Morningside campus, so it suits people who can relocate. Full-time runs a little over a year; part-time stretches to several. If you want the deep version and can arrange your life around it, this is it.

Columbia's online Certification of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine (paid, almost entirely online). The realistic distance option, and the one SDMHI uses to train its own people. Five short courses plus a workshop, taught largely asynchronously, so it works across time zones. Far cheaper and lighter than the full master's while still carrying Columbia's teaching. For most clinicians in Asia who want structured training without leaving their jobs, this is the sensible first port of call. I can vouch for this - I am currently doing this myself! =)

King's College London, MSc in Medical Humanities (London; paid). Run through the Centre for the Humanities and Health, and one of the strongest options in the UK. Several other British universities offer degrees worth a look, including Swansea, Leicester, Bristol, and Kent, most of them taught in person.

University of Melbourne narrative medicine teaching (Australia). Australia's first university narrative medicine subject, taught inside the medical degree by Mariam Tokhi and Fiona Reilly. It sits within the MD rather than being open to the public, but it is a sign of how the field is taking root closer to our own time zone.

The Australian Centre for Narrative Medicine (Australia; paid workshops). An independent training body running workshops and short courses for clinicians and organisations. For readers in the Asia-Pacific, the appeal is practical: the sessions run in a compatible time zone, and the people leading them think about narrative medicine from outside the American mainstream.

Conversations Inviting Change (UK; paid, delivered internationally). Narrative-based practice training developed by John Launer and colleagues, closer to supervision and clinical conversation than to literary study. Useful if your interest is in how narrative changes what happens in the consulting room rather than on the page. SDMHI has drawn on this approach locally and we are hoping to run our own courses soon once we are trained in it.

The Narrative-Based Medicine Lab, University of Toronto (Canada; paid, fully online). Canada's home for narrative-based medicine, run through the Temerty Faculty of Medicine's continuing professional development arm. Its Foundational Certificate is the reason to start here: an accredited, entirely virtual programme taught over a term of evening sessions in two halves, one on the principles and practice of narrative-based medicine and one on writing and reading craft, each led by a clinician alongside a working writer. Learners from every discipline and country are welcome, which makes it one of the few structured courses you can complete in full from Australia or Asia without leaving your job. An Advanced Certificate builds on it through stand-alone workshops that can also be taken on their own. The Lab gives a good deal away free too: the NBM Talks podcast, a case repertory of reflective pieces, and guided writing exercises from the likes of John Launer.

Teaching materials you can source online

This is the richest free category, and the one most useful if you run a reflective-practice group, teach medical students, or simply want to read more deliberately.

NYU LitMed: the Literature, Arts and Medicine Database (free, open access). The workhorse of the field. More than three thousand annotations of novels, poems, films, and artworks relevant to medicine, each with a short scholarly note on why it matters and how it might be taught. Built in 1993 and still maintained. If you are assembling a syllabus or a reading list from scratch, start here.

The Health Humanities Consortium Curricular Toolkit (free). Practical guidance for building a health humanities course or programme, from a single seminar up to a full degree, along with clear working definitions of the field. Aimed at educators who have been asked to "add some humanities" to a curriculum and do not know where to begin.

The Graphic Medicine syllabus repository (free). A collection of real course outlines using comics to teach illness, care, and the body, spanning undergraduate, postgraduate, and health-professional teaching. Even if you never set a comic, the syllabi are a masterclass in structuring a humanities course.

Writing prompts. For running a session or starting your own practice, our own narrative medicine writing prompts are free to use and copy. Narrative Medicine Australia's Wild and Precious Lives also publishes short, generous prompts on a regular schedule.

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon and colleagues (Oxford University Press; paid). The authoritative textbook if you want the theory set out properly rather than assembled from blog posts. Worth buying, or asking a medical library to stock.

Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice Edited by Trisha Greenhalgh and Brian Hurwitz, this landmark collection makes the case that stories are not incidental to clinical medicine — they are its substance. The editors argue that attending to how a patient narrates their illness, not merely cataloguing its observable signs, is what separates good medicine from merely competent medicine. Rather than positioning narrative as a soft counterweight to evidence-based practice, the book insists the two belong together: each does work the other cannot.

University library research guides (free). Several health-sciences libraries, McMaster's among the best, keep curated, current guides to narrative medicine with reading lists and teaching resources. They are quietly excellent and rarely mentioned.

Communities and networks

You can learn a great deal alone, but the field is friendlier than most, and its gatherings are where the useful conversations happen.

The Health Humanities Consortium (US and international). The main scholarly body for the health humanities, with an annual conference and the toolkit mentioned above. Membership is paid; much of the material is free to read.

The Association for Medical Humanities (UK). Britain's learned society for the field, with an annual conference and strong links to the scholarly journal Medical Humanities.

The International Health Humanities Network (UK, global reach). A looser, wider network founded by Paul Crawford at Nottingham, deliberately international in outlook.

The Graphic Medicine International Collective (global; free to join). The community behind graphicmedicine.org and the annual Comics and Medicine conference. Warm, active, and unusually welcoming to newcomers and non-academics.

EUNAMES and ISTUD (Europe). The European society for narrative medicine and health humanities, and the Italian institute that has done more than most to build narrative medicine outside the Anglophone world. Useful if you want to see how the field looks when it is not speaking English.

The Canadian Association for Health Humanities (Canada). Worth knowing chiefly for its directories, which keep useful lists of centres, organisations, and journals current.

#medhumchat (free, online). A reading-and-discussion community that gathers around shared texts. A low-commitment way to find people who care about this.

HEART whatspp (free). You can also join our HEART whatsapp group if you are keen to join a group of like minded people.

The gap in this section is the obvious one: there is no equivalent pan-Asian network with the reach of the bodies above. That absence is part of why HEART exists, and part of what we would like to help change.

Archives and reading anyone can use

These are the resources to send to a patient, a family member, or a colleague who is curious but not academic.

healthtalk.org (UK; free). Thousands of video clips of real patients and carers describing their experiences of hundreds of conditions, drawn from proper academic research at Oxford. One of the few places where the patient voice is the whole point rather than an illustration. Its parent network, DIPEx International, has built versions in other countries.

Graphic Medicine (graphicmedicine.org; free). The home of comics and healthcare: reviews, a podcast, the syllabi collection, and an entry point for anyone who finds a drawing easier to sit with than an essay. The US National Library of Medicine's free online exhibition on graphic medicine is a good, gentle introduction to the genre.

The Patient Voices Programme (UK; free to view). A long-running digital-storytelling project capturing patient and staff stories in their own words and voices.

Books. For illness memoirs and the literature of medicine, we keep our own recommendations in The Company We Keep, so we have not duplicated them here.

This map is not complete, and it is thinnest exactly where we most want it to be full: across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. If you run or know of a course, a set of teaching materials, a community, or an archive that belongs here, especially outside the usual American and British circuit, write to us at narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com and we will add it. The field will only stop looking so Western when the rest of us fill in the map.